of no land beyond--nothing but water." This was
too far for spies, he pleaded, and the Caliph agreed, and gave him a
pass for all the sites of Palestine, with which he traversed the length
and breadth of the Holy Land four times, finding the same trouble in
leaving as he had found in entering. Like Arculf, he saw the fountains
of Jor-Dan, the "glorious church" of Helena at Bethlehem, the tombs of
the Patriarchs at Hebron, the wonders of Jerusalem. Especially was he
moved at the sight of the columns in the Church of the Ascension on
Olivet, "for that man who can creep between those columns and the wall
is freed from all his sins." Tyre and Sidon he passed again and again
"on the coast of the Adriatic Sea (as he calls the Levant), _six_ miles
from one another"; at last he got away to Constantinople, with some
safely smuggled trophies of pilgrimage, and some "balsam in a calabash,
covered with petroleum," but the customs officers would have killed all
of them if the fraud had been found out--so Willibald believed. After
two years of close intercourse with the Greek Christians of New Rome,
living in a "cell hollowed out of the side of a church" (possibly Saint
Sophia), the first of English-born travellers returned to Old Rome, as
Arculf had done, by sea, noticing, like him, "Theodoric's Hell" in the
Liparis. He could not get up the mountain, though curious to see "what
sort of a hell it was" where the Gothic "Tyrant" was damned for the
murder of Boeethius and Symmachus, and for his own impenitent Arianism.
But though he could not be seen or heard, all the pilgrims remarked how
the "pumice that writers use was thrown up by the flame from the hell,
and fell into the sea, and so was cast upon the shore and gathered up."

Such was the philosophy of Catholicism about the countries of the known
world in the eighth century, for Willibald's account was published with
the imprimatur of Gregory III., and, with Arculf's, took rank as a
satisfactory comment on the old Bordeaux Itinerary of four hundred years
ago.

Again, the impression given by our two chief Guide-Books, Arculf and
Willibald, is confirmed by the monk Fidelis, who travelled in Egypt
about 750, and by Bernard the Wise of Mont St. Michel, who went over all
the pilgrim ground a century later (867). Fidelis, sailing up the Nile,
was astonished at the sight of the "Seven Barns of Joseph, (the
Pyramids) looking like mountains, but all of stone, square at the base,
rounded i